I've definitely seen the weirdness you're talking about though. On my system Fedora's got some of the best font rendering out of box of any OS I've seen. On my coworker's laptop it looks godawful by default until one applies the hinting change.

As for the people whining about the base font itself, you could, you know, take the two clicks or so and change it to one you prefer. It's not like we're in the dark old days of hand configuring X11 with Type 1 fonts

Oh, and the font hinting settings are accessible through Gnome-Tweak-Tool. Should be in the F16 repos if it's not installed by default